Wednesday, August 13, 2008

"How do you do anything with your left hand? I don't understand!," my Dad would tease me growing up. Other than writing with ball-point pens (which would invariably get smeared as my crab-like hand moved across the page...), it wasn't all that difficult. One problem I did have, however, was instinctively being able to tell my left from my right. If my Mom told me to fetch something for her from say the upper right dresser drawer, I'd have to stop and think which hand I wrote with and then make a mental note. Sometimes, after figuring out which hand was the right one I'd put it on my head so I wouldn't forget when I got to my destination. Turns out, that not being able to quickly discern right from left is a fairly common quirk. And even more common with lefties.

Something else that is proportionally more common with lefties is how often they run for President. Both John McCain and Barack Obama are southpaws--so which ever man wins, we'll have a lefty in the White House! According to the article in the Washington Post:

No matter who wins in November, six of the 12 chief executives since the end of World War II will have been left-handed: Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, the elder Bush, Clinton and either Obama or McCain. That's a disproportionate number, considering that only one in 10 people in the general population is left-handed.

5 comments:

I'm not a lefty but I have the same problem to this day. I actually have to put my hands out in front of me, index finger and thumb extended, to see which one forms a left in order to figure it out at times. It's embarassing... and somewhat annoying when I'm driving.